British tax authorities have been forced into a humiliating apology, after the extreme stinginess of their attempted benefit clawbacks led to a balls-up depriving hundreds of residents in the north of Ireland of child benefit payments.
A spokesperson for HMRC said:
We’re sorry that a small number of customers in Northern Ireland have mistakenly had their Child Benefit payments suspended. We’re working to contact them so their claims can be reinstated and they are not left out of pocket.
The error occurred as a result of new checks in place that compare international travel data with HMRC child benefit claims. If someone is detected as being outside the United Kingdom for a period longer than that which is allowed in order to claim a particular benefit, an investigation will be triggered at the bean counters’ offices.
In the case of those based in the north of Ireland and travelling back home via Dublin Airport, the absence of border checks between the north and south of the island meant there was only a record of them entering a foreign country (the Republic of Ireland), but not one for re-entering ‘UK soil’ when they reached ‘Northern Ireland’. There is a long standing problem of Britain’s ruling class not being able to get their head around the politics of Ireland, but when even HMRC doesn’t understand, it seems we’re entering a new era of cluelessness.
“Kafkaesque” runaround demanded by HMRC bureaucrats
The Detail gives the example of Maria, a “British citizen living in Belfast”, who got a letter from the tax people after getting back from a brief trip to Italy in May 2025. She had landed at Dublin Airport on her return, then travelled up to Belfast, resulting in the British government having no record of her re-entering UK territory.
The message from HMRC said:
We have information that shows that you left the UK on 19 May 2025 and travelled to Italy. This was more than eight weeks ago, and we have no record of your return.
To resolve the matter, it would have been a simple matter for the authorities to check her PAYE records and see that she was in fact present in Belfast and working, but she was nonetheless forced through the rigmarole of proving her eligibility for child benefit. She was asked to provide:
…three months of bank statements, letters from her child’s school and hospital records.
Maria described the process as “Kafkaesque”, leaving her “exhausted”. She said:
There are so many documents to collect, my son’s school, my own office, it just felt a nuisance. And I happened to have the details of my travel because it was recent, otherwise I might not have the proof for that travel.
HMRC wouldn’t budge, however:
We tried to push back on having to provide all these documents, but they said this is not within our remit, you have to send the documentation because that department is very strict.
Dublin to Belfast is an unauthorised route, citizen
Another case cited is that of Mark Toal, whose family flew into Dublin from England in 2022, then went via bus to Belfast. This route was less expensive than flying to Belfast directly. This led to him getting a letter from HM Revenue & Customs in October 2025 instructing him “to fill in a form with more than 70 questions”. He was asked to also provide his boarding passes from three years ago, which he fortunately had framed and placed above his mantelpiece (only joking, he binned them ages ago because of course he bloody did).
Toal, who described himself as “very annoyed” and said “it boiled [his] blood” trying to resolve the matter, said:
There’s no border control, it is not as if I can tell someone at the border – “Hello I’m back home”.
For now, maybe. In future perhaps we’ll have the luxury of all being fitted with geo-tagging ankle bracelets by Her Majesty’s Pre-Crime division, so that no potential future-crim tries to nick £8.53 they’re not entitled to, cunningly hidden under cover of a weekend in Benidorm returning via Dublin.
Sinn Féin MP for Newry & Armagh Dáire Hughes and party colleagues wrote to Hilary Benn and Daniel Tomlinson, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury respectively, saying:
It is abundantly clear that the practice of HMRC using Home Office data to monitor families’ travel arrangements is completely flawed when it comes to citizens in the north of Ireland.
Malice or incompetence? The British state excels at both
Speaking via X on Monday October 27, Hughes said:
Following pressure from Sinn Féin’s team of MPs, HMRC has reinstated the Child Benefit payments of most families affected by recent errors.
He continued:
It is vital that all outstanding payments are reinstated to families who have done nothing wrong. These incidents highlight the flawed nature of policy being made in Britain without any understanding of the reality of life here in the north. It further demonstrates how the British government continuously makes policy with no regard for people here. The British government and HMRC must also ensure this never happens again.
The HMRC spokesperson said 180 families have had payments reinstated, and stated that PAYE records will now be checked before any potential future suspensions. Additional checks will also be done for those returning to the North of Ireland via the Republic of Ireland.
Of course, whether this whole shitshow was incompetence is open to debate. When it comes to Britain’s benefit system, malice should never be ruled out. The country is notoriously parsimonious when it comes to welfare outlay, with sadism regarding assistance to children most visible in the vile two child benefit cap. HMRC claim the new checks have prevented £17 million from being wrongly paid out, but quite how great the savings are would be interesting to see, once the admin costs for all this hounding of innocent people are factored in.
Sadly the following are never measured – the stress of dealing with this nonsense, the time spent on both sides tidying up the mess, and the inordinate cost to society of millions of people left in deprivation through lack of proper welfare support. Take all that into consideration and the politicians in successive governments that have pushed these policies are revealed for what they truly are – people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Featured image via the Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.